My Bonnie lies over the Ocean

Spoiler alert: miracle dog story

Today, sitting in my little RV office, wrapped, deliciously against the chill I notice that I’m wearing one half of the boots I was wearing in the accident and I think how compelling it is to long for union, how taking something away reveals what was there in the first place. I can’t remember wanting something more than I currently want to put two shoes on and go for a hike.

At a recent conference I shared a lunch with with a new Dutch friend whose husband, Raymond, had recently died, “cancer, suddenly, everywhere, and then gone.” I’m not sure why I asked her if she missed him but I did and she replied, “his presence is fuller with me than ever,” she paused then said, “ to miss him would be noticing in the wrong direction.”

I love people who have that post death connection, there’s a quietude, like when a guest gets a call at a noisy party and has to excuse themselves into a quiet room where they can receive it.

Recently I’ve been really lit up by the understanding of “correspondences,” the idea that the energetic life expression of a thing (not the thing itself) correlates to other stuff, in this reality and other dimensions too. The warm heart honey that animates a certain star, also purrs in the flight of the Golden-Winged dragon fly that can only be found in ancient heathlands in Scotland or Wales. Shamanism gets it. You see three hawks on your way home, you know you’ve got a correspondence asking for a deeper quality of attention. If met with a softness of inquiry, an openness of heart and mind, the symbolic interaction with the hawks will yield a deeper access, to all of life, in and out.

Five weeks ago my puppy was paralyzed in the car accident and several vets, a neurosurgeon and a pet psychic all told us, unequivocally, to euthanize her, not only that, but to do otherwise would be selfish and cruel: there was no way she’d ever regain use of her body after the trauma to her spine.

The trickiest slopes of my existence have been when I am really hurt/lost/out of alignment and that coincides with the time to make a Big Decision. My own struggle and pain created a cloud thru which I had to struggle to hear a very quiet, niggling thought way back in my psyche trying to get my attention. As we agonized (not using this word lightly) over the life of this sweet, formerly unstoppably active puppy, now lying still, day and night, shitting and peeing herself and trembling with constant pain, it was very very very hard to think anything other than, “they’re right.”

But I couldn’t get out of my head the story of how she came to us. Somehow it felt important. Of course, she arrived before she arrived, in the form of a song my son learned at Quaker camp, “My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea, o, bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me…”. He’d sing it to anyone who’d listen, like he was practicing for something.

So when, a few months later, he found four, very young pups, shivering together in a sweater, on the side of the river where there are not paths or roads, so he had to swim each one across, one at a time, until finally he turned for one last crossing, saying, “Now I’m going to get mine.” And met, Bonnie, who the river, apparently, had brought back to him.

As I wrestled to even properly consider the euthanize option, I suddenly realized that while Bonnie was a flesh and bone dog, struggling, she was also a correspondence, a symbol, a hailing from a deeper realm. And to give up on her would be to would be to collapse the conversation that was trying to happen through that hailing. Is it too heavy handed to say that part of her contract with us is to crack our tiny grinch hearts open to the true nature of condition-less love and to usher us solidly onto the path of devotion which is the only path where that kind of love can live? It is heavy handed to say it. And I’m saying it.

The beginning of anything is always the hardest - wrangling a new path out of the dense briars of hopelessness - from whence to source the energy to fight for love. It’s funny when you take a minute and just hear yourself how the answer is already there. Ask yourself how to find the energy to fight for love and somehow, you are already in the ring. The simple framework illumed the path. We were not trying to keep her alive, but we were fighting for the love that she had carved into the center of our lives like an ancient river. We were fighting to maintain enough heart awareness to hear right action from within the truth of that river.

The action path was something like, do the best we can for her and with her in each moment and keep listening for when that changed, then do better. The first night when the emergency room vet told us she might not make it through the night, we activated the network and had literally thousands of people EFT tapping and praying for her. Magical dog healer, Jae brought over a healing tPemf pad and I’d lay with her and imagine her and I running up mountains together. Often I’d just weep.

Grieving her paralysis gave me access to grieve my own. Her suffering was something I couldn’t avoid so it wooed me into a fully embrace of the hard bits. Watching her tremble and twitch helplessly sliced thru so many layers of chain mail armor on my own trembling, twitching human heart.

Bonnie, the symbol, the correspondence to deeper universal love wisdom actually shattered some very old, very rusty hinge on my heart the first moment I saw this video while still in London. I couldn’t watch the video and allow the grief, relief, love tsunami to tear through me and remain armored at the same time. I cried myself dehydrated then I wept until I fell asleep and woke with a weeping hangover.

Hey y’all my paralyzed dog is walking. Kinda :)

When we, not only stand in the presence of a miracle, (which is a true and unhindered expression of wholeness returning) but actually let it all the fucking way in, there’s a part of us that corresponds to that rising, and rises with it. Our inner miracle puppies start yapping like crazy.

When I consider the delight that miracles are, a montage appears in my head, of stories and moments, rare as hen’s teeth, that include someone revealing how something impossible and Very Hard got better and maybe even beautiful.

Some attribute those energetic movements to god or spiritual practice - but beneath all of those stories is a fundamental human stumbling in the direction of grace, doing their absolute best to open the inner windows and not really having any real clue but aiming preciously, in the best we can do kind of way, like how Douglas Adams, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, describes the process of learning to fly: you aim at the ground,

and somehow miss.